Sunday, September 16, 2007

Technology in Society: Government

Lack of funds and resources has long been a problem in our government. If i start on how much of our annual national budget goes to waste and why, then one post would probably not be enough. Let us put aside the obvious problems of corruption and ask ourselves: Does the government really know what they are missing in terms of technology?

The latest in technology may be widespread in our country, from personal computers, mobile phones, to mp3 players, but we have yet to appreciate the benefits of integrating technology in our society in a much larger scale. Technology does not only exist for convenience and recreation, but to solve real-world problems that our leaders face in a day-to-day basis. One concern we often fail to focus on is the inefficiency of our crime management system. To this day, blotters are still done with ink and paper and stored in notebooks kept in each precinct. These ofcourse can easily be tampered with and it takes ages to locate a single record. With the technology available today, reports can easily be uploaded to a centralized database which can be accessed anywhere, at anytime. Although our local authorities at NBI are already utilizing a database to store criminal records, the same system can be implemented in other institutions or organizations for ID purposes. We have also yet to integrate recording of DNA, which we all know is a fool proof way of identifying people for whatever reason, be it finding a suspect, or even finding your long-lost family. Obviously, we still have a long way to go in terms of exploiting technology. Why? that's a different story altogether.

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